About That Idris Elba Gold Documentary

Clickbait Title: Can this magical metal make you immortal? Godkings hate this one weird trick!

This was a lot of fun to work on because I got to spend a lot of time learning THE TRUTH ABOUT GOLD and by that I mean actually interesting facts about how humans use gold. The mythology of gold actually makes a lot of sense through the lens of its physical properties, the fact that ancient humans could make things out of it and those things would outlive generations. It's just rare enough that societal elites can monopolize it, but common enough you can gather enough to actually make stuff with it. So these things, namely jewellery for the leaders, are so resistant to the elements that you can see how the gold itself became representative of the power of the kings, of their claimed immortality.

Written and performed by Dan Olson

00:00:00 - Gold Open
00:00:53 - Ads for gold
00:03:05 - Gold is interesting
00:07:17 - Not everything is rosy for gold
00:11:45 - Enter the World Gold Council
00:14:56 - A journey with Idris Elba
00:20:02 - It's boring
00:22:22 - Colonialism
00:24:50 - The environment
00:33:52 - The rest of the doc
00:36:03 - Reception
00:37:47 - The Golden Thread
00:39:53 - Selling shovels in a gold rush

[MicahSps]

Elba’s performance was praised as “Contractually Obligated”

[werbnaright]

" For every one job created directly, 6 jobs are indirectly created"
In Cajamarca Peru, a Canadian company mined for years. They brought in workers from the capital, Lima, because the locals were allegedly not skilled enough. When the company left, they took the gold, the profits, and the wages went back to their home cities while leaving behind contaminated drinking water which have caused skyrocketing cancer rates for over a decade.

[Problemsolver]

I am a Ghanaian, and pollution from gold mining is a horrible plague on the country

[zjplunkett]

This is a very vintage slice of Folding Ideas. Less "Documentary on social phenomena" and more "Dan watched a thing that annoyed him". I'm here for it.

[degenermights]

Imagine buying gold instead of just stealing it from the dragons horde like a real man

[forevererrol]

"this is not a minor problem, this is one of the fundamental by-products of the mining process" sounds very much like a miner problem

[McSwirley]

“hey, these guys have almost cracked the toxic pit problem”

“wait what toxic pit problem”

just fantastic

[veteratorvulpes]

How long until YouTube offers advertisers a specific upgrade package titled 'Don't show this video to Dan Olsen'

[DuctTapeJake]

"These people didn't have any money, but they could sell their family heirlooms for money to rebuild their lives" is not the selling point they seem to think it is...

[Wote]

Dan's willingness to make video essays about ads that annoy him is and remains fascinating.

[scolkereybel]

Dan genres:
- Film criticisms
- Deep dives into patterns of human behaviors and our susceptibility to scams, or conspiracy theories, of understanding how and why people fall prey to our darker urges
- Ads he does not like

[drpavel_]

"They don' represent tiny artesian mines consisting of three dudes sharing the one jack hammer"
This is such a funny concept

[FishMr]

The boxing day tsunami bit hit me like a truck. It both comes out of nowhere and is then just *uniquely* horrifying. "Oh yeah, these people who lost their families in the worst natural disaster this century, they recovered *by selling their family heirlooms* "

These people had to literally sell their family history, their culture, their last remaining memories of their dead relatives, to survive. And this is presented as a *good* thing.

[.friendshipstation]

After 8 years of making video essays Dan has finally succumb to thematic backlighting

[morganqorishchi]

For those wondering what happens if you drink the forbidden Gatorade: all the geese who accidentally did it once died from internal bleeding due to bleeding ulcers, burst intestines, or a combination of the two.

[XShadoWPaws]

I will forever despise that "mining companies always clean up after themselves" claim. There have been entire civil wars started by mining companies simply not wanting to pay to clean up a decommissioned mine. In Australia, where I live, Rio Tinto left a uranium mine completely abandoned and unprocessed literally because one of their hedge funds didn't want to pay to clean it up.

[MrMuel]

45 minutes? Interesting to see Dan getting into Youtube shorts.

[surturz]

I feel an urge to invent some sort of weird grift so I can end up on a Dan Olsen documentary

[Antonicane]

"But with gold comes power, and those miners knew that."

That sentence is so charged you could run Las Vegas off it for millennia.

[SavageGreywolf]

Of all the twists this video could have taken, 'the gold industry documentary is bad at telling you that the gold industry did a good thing' was not one I expected